John McPhee’s Oranges is a delightful read.
A collection of seven essays, the book began in the 1960s as a pitch for a short article for The New Yorker. “I intended only some hundreds of words, a few pages in the magazine,” McPhee writes in the preface. But after visiting the University of Florida’s Citrus Experiment Station, his “short article turned into a book.”
McPhee came back from Florida with forty thousand words. The New Yorker ran most of them across two issues in May 1966; Farrar, Straus and Giroux published all of them the following year.
The slim volume—it’s only about 145 pages—details the fruit’s history and botany; the business of growing the things, and of making orange juice and its concentrate; and the growers, packinghouse workers, and scientists he met along the way.
Oranges doesn’t offer anything in the way of a history of the artist’s color orange, but it does offer a bit about the color of the fruit: The color of an orange tells you nothing about the ripeness of the fruit inside; it tells you only about the climate in which it was grown. In fact, McPhee tells us, “some oranges that become orange while they are still unripe may turn green again as they ripen.” (Once picked, however, an orange will not continue to ripen.)
“The color of an orange has no absolute correlation with the maturity of the flesh and juice inside. An orange can be as sweet and ripe as it will ever be and still glisten like an emerald in the tree. Cold—coolness, rather—is what makes an orange orange. In some parts of the world, the weather never gets cold enough to change the color.”
In tropical regions, like Brazil, which is the world’s leading producer of oranges and exporter of oranges and orange juice, oranges are green. In subtropical regions, like the United States, cooler temperatures kill off the chlorophylls (the pigments that produce an effect of green) in the fruit’s skin, which exposes the carotenoids (a class of pigments that produce an orange effect) beneath. In America and Europe, where green fruit is associated with un-ripeness, oranges are often forced from green to orange.
“To make their oranges marketably orange, packers can do two things, one of which is, loosely speaking, natural and the other wholly artificial. The first is a process that was once known as “gassing,” but the unpleasant connotations of that word have caused it to be generally suppressed, and most people now say “de-greening” instead. Green or partly green oranges are put into chambers where, for as much as four days, ethylene gas is circulated among them. The gas helps eliminate the chlorophyll in the flavedo, or outer skin, which is, in a sense, tiled with cells that contain both orange and green pigments. The orange ones are carotenoids, the green ones are chlorophylls, and the chlorophylls are so much more intense that, while they are there, the orange color will not show through.”
McPhee continues,
“The chlorophyll is protected from the enzyme by a thin membrane called a tonoplast. In chilly weather, the tonoplast loses its strength and breaks down, and the enzyme gets at the chlorophyll and destroys it. The orange becomes orange.”
Oranges are de-greened in both Florida and California, the two top orange-producing markets in the United States, “often merely to improve an already good color.”
The second method to make oranges orange is to dip them in dye. Citrus Red No. 2, “an aggressive and unnerving pink” that “produces an acceptable color” when “applied to the green and yellow-green and yellow-orange surfaces of oranges,” is the only dye permitted by federal law for this purpose. Oranges dyed with it must “be labeled as such and that they contain ten per cent more juice than the established minimum for undyed oranges.” A cancer-causing chemical, it is, however, banned in California.
McPhee also gives us a quick lesson in the word’s etymology:
“The word ‘orange’ evolved from Sanskrit. The Chinese word for orange, in ancient as well as modern Chinese, is ‘jyu,’ but it did not migrate with the fruit. India was the first major stop in the westward travels of citrus, and the first mention of oranges in Sanskrit literature is found in a medical book called the Charaka-Samhita, which was compiled approximately two thousand years ago. The Hindus called an orange a ‘naranga,’ the first syllable of which…was a prefix meaning fragrance. This became the Persian ‘naranj,’ a word the Muslims carried through the Mediterranean. In Byzantium, an orange was a ‘nerantzion.’ This, in Neo-Latin, became variously styled as ‘arangium,’ ‘aranium,’ and ‘aurantium’—eventually producing ‘naranja’ in Spain, ‘laranja’ in Portugal, ‘arancia’ in Italy, and ‘orange’ in France.”
While not even in the slightest about the color, Oranges is a fascinating meditation on a thing that is both common and regular, yet not usually a source of any particular interest. It’s a charming book, which feels both unexpected and indulgent during ~these times~. Beautifully written, and funny (“Florida was the only wilderness in the world that attracted middle-age pioneers.” And, “Florida, even then, appealed to aging doctors, retired brokers, and consumptives.”), the thing is truly a treat.
More: After Oranges by Wyatt Williams, a beautiful essay about the book and its author.